Tina Craig thinks skin care has a colorful future.
“We believe the future of skin care is color,” she said of her brand U Beauty’s latest launch, a tinted iteration of the Super Hydrator, which launches Wednesday in 11 shades. “As technology shifts, the focus will be on your skin because we take so much time and effort for it.”
The Super Tinted Hydrator retails for $108 and will debut on the brand’s website in addition to Violet Grey, Bluemercury, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Revolve, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s and Cos Bar, among other.
The launch follows U Beauty’s first few plays in the makeup arena, which included tinted iterations of its lip treatment, the Lip Plasma Compound. Craig said the new launch was simply a reaction to consumer demand.
“That was one of the biggest questions when I would say for people to ask me anything. People would ask me if I was going to tint the Super Hydrator,” she said. “I don’t feel the need to continually add new categories, unless it’s something so novel and groundbreaking, like the Barrier Bioactive Treatment. We’re not going to cannibalize our beloved hydrator by offering 500 different creams, so what better than to allow people to use their favorite moisturizer with a tint?”
Craig cautioned that she thinks of U Beauty still as a skin care brand, not as a bi-axis beauty brand. “I’m not going into makeup,” she said. “The future of skin care is color. This is just an extension of our skin care brand.”
Iterating on fan-favorite products is also a tenet of the brand’s strategy moving forward. “We just want to go deep with the beloved, fan favorite, tried-and-true products of U Beauty,” Craig said. Industry sources estimate the product will reach $3 million in retail sales for its first year on the market.
Consumer feedback and internal feedback played into the launch, which took more than two years to complete. “We love making decisions guided by what our team feels has been successful,” said Kate Klobe Wasserstein, chief brand officer of U Beauty. “Makeup artists were constantly saying what a great primer it was. Instead of going into a separate subcategory, we saw how people were using the product and built on it.”
The expectation is that the Super Tinted Hydrator will resonate with existing customers as well as new ones. “It’s for somebody who wants added ease in her morning routine and who’s maybe wanted to try the brand but is loyal to their tinted moisturizer,” Craig said. “But at the same time, it’s for the die-hard, loyal customer.”
The brand’s forward-thinking viewpoint also inspired the launch’s accompanying campaign, which drew inspiration from the work of David Sims and Craig McDean, in addition to the 1997 film “Gattaca.”
“We’re always trying to hit these two aesthetic vectors with our creative, one being elevated minimalism, and the other being a nod to our technology and clinical underpinnings,” Wasserstein said. “We wanted to focus on this cerebral futurism because the future of skin care is in color, that’s been the mantra internally for many months.”
